Imperialism’s essence, new mechanisms of domination and reclaiming Lenin’s method of analysis: An interview with Blanca Missé
(Part I)
Blanca Missé is an associate professor at San Francisco State University and a Workers Voice member, who is active with the Ukraine Solidarity Network and the Labor for Palestine National Network. Together with Ashley Smith, she is co-host of The Real News Network podcast series Solidarity Without Exception.
In the first part of this extensive interview with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Missé argues for reclaiming Lenin’s method for analysing imperialism and suggests updates, particularly on understanding China and Russia’s global status. In Part II, Missé looks at inter-imperialist rivalry today, the need to oppose all imperialisms and the case for a class-based internationalism.
Discussions regarding imperialism often refer to Lenin’s pamphlet on the subject. How do you define imperialism? Do you see Lenin’s concept as still valid?
The core of Lenin’s concept of imperialism remains valid. Still, his work on imperialism cannot be boiled down to a simple formula or treated as dogma. More than Lenin’s theory, I consider it as one developed by revolutionaries who combated chauvinism during World War I and helped build the Third International until its degeneration in the mid-1920s. In simple terms, imperialism says that the rise of monopoly production and finance capital gave rise to multinational corporations needing to expand beyond national borders. This accelerated imperialist rivalry, national oppression, chauvinism, militarism, and war. Looking at today’s world, this phase of capitalism has not disappeared or weakened — quite the opposite.
The value of the Marxist theory of imperialism, which has been much enriched throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, lies in documenting the specific mechanisms leading capitalist states to intervene economically abroad to extract value and profits, eventually resorting to military intervention to protect their investments. Its goal is to connect what mainstream liberal thinkers keep separate: the inner trends of world capitalism and the political manifestations of national oppression (such as wars, plundering, coercion, targeted repression of movements and the overthrow of governments) in colonial and semi-colonial countries. But while the essence of imperialism — “the dominance of monopolies and finance capital” as Lenin put it — and the relentless effort to divide and redivide the world remains unchanged, the form of imperialist domination has evolved.
The fact that today we might see a different configuration of imperialist powers, with new imperialisms rising such as China and Russia, does not negate the ongoing trend of the monopolisation, concentration and centralisation of capital in the hands of imperialist bourgeoisie, or their ruthless competition. A compelling 2011 study by Swiss researchers presented a startling scenario. Their analysis of 43,000 transnational corporations revealed that 147 of them — less than 1% of the total surveyed — control 40% of global wealth through ownership connections. More importantly, the study showed that 75% of those leading companies are financial corporations (with JP Morgan, Citigroup, BNP, HSBC and Credit Suisse at the top).
Economic capital, the defining feature of imperialism, continues to shape today’s world economy, which is controlled by giant banks and financiers. This aligns with Lenin’s early 20th-century observation that “a personal link-up, so to speak, is established between the banks and the biggest industrial and commercial enterprise.” Today’s transnational corporations also remain concentrated in key countries and are not evenly spread around the globe. Of the top 200 corporations identified in the study, 122 are located in five Western imperialist countries.
Do you think some on the left and in the socialist movement have tended to move away from Lenin’s conception of imperialism?
Yes. This is due to two combined processes — the post-war economic surge and the reestablishment of capitalism in former worker states — that were very confusing for the socialist movement.
The continued growth of Western capitalism after World War II, along with the economic and ideological impacts of capitalist restoration in the former worker states, supported a strong propaganda effort asserting that world capitalism had stabilised and could be managed, ultimately reducing wars and improving global living standards. Of course, the facts contradict any idea of a “peaceful” post-war period. The Military Intervention Project at Tufts University documents more than 120 US military interventions abroad between 1946–89, which is three times as many as the period before (1918-45).
The fact that after WWII, the US quickly rose to become a virtually uncontested world superpower for five decades, presenting a different configuration of imperialist forces than the one sketched by Lenin, led some to conclude that the Marxist theory of imperialism was no longer valid. For a generation or two, the predictions of the Marxist theory of imperialism did not immediately ring true for those in imperial centres. In the Marxist tradition, some narrowed Lenin’s theory to the export of capital from the core to the periphery, fetishising that feature and concluding, as Michael Kidron did, that Britain was no longer an imperialist power.
However, during the postwar period, for most socialists and Marxists in the semi-colonial world, the nature of imperialism was not at stake, but rather the need to understand its new forms of domination. Socialists grappled with the need to analyse the contradictions of formal independence, the mutations of the world division of labour across successive waves of accumulation and technological innovation, and, alongside that, the new forms of colonial and imperialist domination.
The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union triggered a major crisis within Socialist and Communist groups, as well as those who looked to them as a point of reference. It raised doubts about Marxism as a theory capable of explaining global politics. This was combined with confusion and pessimism stemming from the general decline in both socialist and activist working-class forces worldwide at the end of the 20th century.
This resulted from the ruling class’s economic and political offensive against the working class in that epoch, and even some key defeats (Chile, Indonesia, Tiananmen Square, etc). And the subjective factor came into play — the ongoing impoverishment of theory, strategy and uncompromising leadership (mainly by the Stalinists) — which held back working people’s ability to recover and fight back.
New theories emerged along with mainstream neoliberal thinking about the end of socialism, which posited that imperialism — the era of wars and revolutions — was a thing of the past. Some reduced imperialism to foreign policy driven by military aggression, in a neo-Kautskian way, and predicted the possibility of everlasting peace.
For instance, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri argued in Empire (2000) that the classical form of imperialism — where a few dominant nation-states compete for colonies and global dominance — has been replaced by a new international order. This new order is not centred on territorial disputes but is instead a decentralised, de-territorialised network of power that controls the world economy. Sovereignty is shared among transnational institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and United Nations), multinational corporations and global legal frameworks (such as human rights and trade laws).
Other prominent Western political theorists of the post-war era moved even further away from Marxism by separating imperialism and capitalism, and suggesting broad, diluted theories. Imperialism was seen by some, such as Giovanni Arrighi, as a transhistorical process, either as a political and organisational form of governance developed by states. For others, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, it is a simple opposition between a core and its periphery through various relations.
If revising, or even moving away from, the Marxist theory of imperialism had an audience in the Western world for a few decades, that began to change at the start of the Iraq War (2003–11), when revolutionary socialists began to use events to challenge these arguments. With the protracted war in Ukraine and heightened inter-imperialist rivalry, they are hardly useful to explain what is happening today in the world.
Today, the Marxist understanding of imperialism is being reconsidered by almost every serious, committed labour or social movement activist, socialist and revolutionary worldwide. The illusion of a stable capitalism that imbued the Western world started to fade in the early 21st century, prompted by waves of uprising in Latin America due to debt-caused impoverishment, failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, and new movements led by millennial youth — from the Indignados in Spain to Occupy in the US — in response.
This trend deepened with the first wave of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, followed by the Maidan protests in Ukraine, huge farmers’ struggles in India, the 2019 popular insurrection in Chile (with echoes in Colombia), the return of mass strikes across continental Europe, and the recent mass protests by Generation Z in Morocco, Nepal, and Madagascar. These recurring popular uprisings demanding an escape from the imposed future of poverty, war, austerity, and environmental destruction, combined with two major wars (Ukraine and Palestine), clearly show that we are still living in an era of wars and revolutions — powered by imperialism as the deadliest phase of capitalism.
Given this, should socialists seek to reclaim Lenin’s method to analyse today’s crisis of world imperialism?
Absolutely. We need to update it to account for significant global evolutions in capitalism since WWII, but yes, of course. It was not so much the method of a great individual, but rather the result of a collective elaboration by revolutionary Marxists deeply embedded in the struggles of the working class. They made a deliberate attempt to develop an internationalist perspective by engaging with revolutionaries in other countries, rather than being satisfied with a narrow national viewpoint.
Lenin and Leon Trotsky were able to analyse the emergence and development of world imperialism from an actual internationalist viewpoint because they were simultaneously invested in building an international organisation for struggle with other revolutionaries in different countries. Because they had to constantly account for uneven and contradictory trends in the world-class battle, they did not see imperialist rivalry as a confrontation between fixed blocs — a sort of trench war — but as a totality of contradictory relations in constant movement.
In fact, in his preparatory Notebooks for Imperialism, Lenin insisted on analysing the different imperialist states as embedded in a totality — a dynamic world order with living inter-relations among states, consisting of complex relations of subordination, domination, or codependency. Each imperialist state has its own strengths and weaknesses, due to a varying combination of economic and political transformations.
Imperialist powers should never be considered in isolation from their historical background or by abstract standards or norms. Lenin analysed imperialist states based on their capacity to enforce their rule abroad without outside support. While Britain, Germany and the US had risen to be “fully independent” powers, Lenin viewed Russia and Japan as “not fully independent” imperialisms.
The contradictions inherent to dependent and uneven imperialisms are not an exception to the Marxist theory of imperialism. The anomaly, instead, has been the US’s uncontested world domination for several decades. If we recover Lenin’s method, we can understand why, for example, Russia can be an imperialist state today, oppressing its near neighbours abroad while depending economically on China, or how Spain still enforces its imperialist domination in Latin America while being subordinated to German capital inside the European Union.
In the interwar period, Trotsky rescued Lenin’s method against Josef Stalin. In The Third International After Lenin, he questioned the nascent Soviet bureaucracy’s abandonment of internationalism, in both theoretical and practical terms. Arguing that “not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country”, he said the world revolutionary movement must develop an analysis “of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts”. This work led to The War and the Fourth International and the foundation of the Fourth International.
Today, like in the early decades of the 20th century, we are again experiencing an imperialist world order in deep crisis and constant change. To understand its main trends and contradictions, we must revisit this analytical method.
Could you elaborate a bit more on what parts of Lenin’s understanding of imperialism you think have been superseded by subsequent developments or require updating?
As for the most critical contemporary updates, I list four.
The first involves updating our understanding of the various mechanisms of economic and financial domination. It is true that Lenin highlighted in Imperialism the export of capital (or foreign direct investment), as the primary form of value extraction at the time, but he never claimed it would always be that way or that it was the definitive criterion.
In fact, he briefly noted that “the world has become divided into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states.” At the time, he was considering, for example, the role of Britain in financially subjugating “Egypt, Japan, China, and South America”. These countries, although recently gaining formal independence, were developing new forms of economic dependence.
In the postwar period, Marxist economists, such as Ernest Mandel, Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel, identified other forms of imperialist domination, such as unequal exchange arising from a structurally fraught global division of labour between commodity producers and industrialised countries. More recently, Marxist scholars such as Andy Higginbottom and Intan Suwandi have examined how this hierarchy is embedded in today’s global value chains.
Another crucial form of domination is debt. The use of debt service payments became the main form of US imperialist domination after WWII, especially following the oil crisis of the mid-70s. Also, so-called “multilateral” organisations (WTO, WB, IMF) emerged as significant mechanisms of imperialist domination. National and foreign debt have been a double form of imperialist oppression: extortion through extracting direct surplus value via interest payments, and coercion by forcing national governments to implement economic policies that open markets, assets, and natural resources to predation by foreign capital.
Eric Toussaint has written extensively on what he calls “ the tyranny of global finance,” highlighting the subtle mechanisms of imperialist domination through neoliberal and free-market policies. As he recently explained, the international financial institutions were created “to enforce payment and finance the reconstruction of Europe” and “to maintain [Western] imperial domination of countries that became independent through national liberation struggles and decolonization after the war.”
A study from 2021 calculated that since 1960, the imperialist West has drained $62 trillion in real terms, and that “if this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today” — 5 times the US’s GDP in 2025.
The second update concerns establishing distinct labour markets and imperialist powers relying on both steady flows of immigration to imperialist centres and enforcing a capitalist border regime to enable the overexploitation of the semi-colonial world, or the “Global South”. John Smith has explained this in his analysis of the global hierarchy of labour, where he documents how surplus value is extracted in the Global South and realised in the Global North. The “global labour arbitrage” developed in the neoliberal period may not be the “central” mechanism of modern imperialism, but it is a fundamental one.
On the other hand, and to complete Smith’s picture, we need to look at the role of migrant labour in imperialist centres. Mass immigration is a result of capital exports and the destruction of national economies. According to the UN, in 2024, the global number of international migrants was nearly 304 million. International migrants comprise 3.7% of the global population today.
Justin Akers Chacon has developed a sharp Marxist analysis of the role of immigration in the post-WWII imperialist world. He says that the pro-capitalist border regime is designed to favour capital, which has the complete right of mobility. This allows profits to be repatriated on a large scale with little or no actual taxation, while ensuring needed labour is offshored to peripheral countries with significantly lower wages and migrant labour at home is criminalised to make it more exploitable.
The third major change concerns the looming ecological disaster and the need to embed the concept of a metabolic rift with nature within any analysis of imperialist domination. The foundational work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, and the early publications of Kohei Saito are essential to reestablish the true scope of Marxist analysis of capitalism. Nature has always been, like human activity, one of the vital forces of production exploited by capitalism, which now drastically disrupts the possibility of sustainable renewal.
Monopoly production is fuelled by the abstract logic of capital accumulation, which constantly expands the number of commodities and depletes natural resources. As it assumes resources are unlimited, it poses the greatest threat to the environment and humanity.
Also, some scholars examine what they call “climate” or “ecological imperialism,” which focuses on the environmental aspect of profit extraction and value transfer. They describe the shift toward “offshore” or externalising environmental costs onto poorer countries, and the monopolisation of green transition profits within rival imperialist centres, while maintaining control over global environmental governance. Today, it is impossible to seriously oppose world imperialism without fully adopting a socialist ecological perspective.
Finally, and this is still developing, we see in the early 21st century another historical trajectory, unforeseen by early 20th century Marxists, for the rise of new imperialist powers: the transformation of powerful productive forces — initially developed by a workers’ state — into private monopoly capital as they became intertwined with the capitalist mode of production and accumulation through a top-down process capitalist restoration.
Could you further outline your views on Russia and China, particularly on how the economic foundations for these new imperialist forces were laid and what specific characteristics enabled them to join the imperialist camp?
There are two major new imperialist powers today that are upending the old world order: China and Russia. Both result from capitalist restoration in former deformed worker states, yet through very different processes.
Russia today is an imperialist state resulting from an uneven industrial development focused on fossil fuels, petrochemical mining, nuclear energy, and arms production, with new openings in agrochemicals and other sectors. The economy of today’s Russian Federation was built on the foundation of the Soviet workers’ state, first degenerated by decades of bureaucratic Stalinism then rapidly privatised in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The capitalist restoration process was contradictory and chaotic. In the ’90s, living standards for Russia’s proletariat rapidly declined, and Western capital invested in a predatory way to plunder state assets. This did not result, however, in its wholesale subordination, because by the early 2000s, the crony capitalists of the Boris Yeltsin era were displaced by oligarchs from Vladimir Putin’s intelligence milieu.
Putin laid the foundations of a new imperialist state by strengthening the remaining strategic industrial sectors of the Soviet state, such as fossil fuels and heavy industry, and deploying one of the world’s strongest militaries to secure its assets in the former Soviet republics. His strategy was to integrate new bourgeois elements closely into the state, demanding their unconditional allegiance and rewarding them with public financing, procurement contracts and direct state protection.
The country became the world’s second-largest natural gas producer, supplying 12% of global demand, and before the 2022 Ukraine War, it produced 13% of crude oil and 11% of refined oil. Russia also leads in metals, being the top producer of palladium and a primary source of cobalt, gallium, and phosphates — key for electronics, batteries, AI, and fertilisers. This resource base, combined with a strong agrochemical sector, underpinned Russia’s strategy of leveraging industrial and energy dominance to sustain economic and geopolitical power. Since 2022, the Russian state has bolstered the industrial-military complex, with many plants repurposed or intensified to produce arms, munitions, and military hardware.
In parallel, the new regime did not hesitate to rely disproportionately on its military apparatus to exert dominion in particular regions and areas abroad. To that end, it established the Collective Security Treaty Organisation in 2002 to institutionalise control of its near abroad. It also brutally intervened to maintain its power in its near abroad, starting with the war in Chechnya (1994-96, 1999-2009), then Tajikistan (1992-97), Georgia (2008), and finally the two military aggressions against Ukraine (2014, 2022). Putin also led direct and indirect political interventions in Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Abkhazia, Serbia, and Bosnia to secure his interests over the past two decades.
China is the result of a different process of capitalist restoration — one that began earlier and has since the start been channelled by the Chinese state and the Communist Party of China (CPC). China’s CPC-led capitalist restoration in China was inseparable from its reconciliation with US imperialism.
Starting in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, this process transformed China into the world’s leading platform for capitalist manufacturing, culminating decades later in its emergence as a rival imperialist power to the US. The CPC bureaucracy — heir to the Mao-Stalinist apparatus that had usurped the 1949 revolution — played the central role, preserving its political monopoly while directing the transition to capitalism in a controlled, gradualist fashion. Its dictatorship guaranteed the conditions required by foreign capital: huge profits, a super-exploited and politically disenfranchised working class, cheap infrastructure, and a favourable business environment.
The restoration began with the “Reform and Opening-up” policy (1978-79), which dismantled collective farms and introduced the “family responsibility system” in the countryside. Decollectivisation released hundreds of millions of peasants, who were driven into the cities as migrant labourers under an apartheid-like hukou regime. Their cheap, unprotected labour became the foundation of China’s rapid capitalist accumulation. The state also created Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and coastal investment corridors to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), integrating China into regional production networks dominated by Japan and the “Asian Tigers.”
The repression of the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 marked a decisive turn: after crushing the mass movement for democracy and social justice, the CPC accelerated full-scale capitalist restoration. Following China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, US and European multinationals relocated production to China, making it the “factory of the world.” The Chinese bourgeoisie emerged as both partner and rival of foreign capital, strengthened by integration into global supply chains, massive infrastructure projects, and state-directed credit. By the 2010s, China had surpassed the US as the largest manufacturing nation, while maintaining extraordinarily high investment rates (about 40% of GDP).
A distinctive feature of Chinese capitalism is its fusion of state and private capital. The CPC regime retained control over banking, energy, and strategic industries, while supporting the rise of private oligopolies in technology, electronics and consumer sectors. State banks and enterprises provide financing, subsidies, and favourable policies to these “national champions,” ensuring political control and coordinated international expansion. By 2017, the private sector accounted for more than 60% of GDP, 70% of high-tech firms, and more than 80% of urban employment.
China’s imperialist drive intensified after the global crisis of 2007-08, which cut exports and threatened domestic overaccumulation. The CPC responded by unleashing huge state investment — 45% of GDP — and launching a new development model under Xi Jinping. Programs such as Made in China 2025 and China Standards 2035 sought technological autonomy and global leadership in sectors such as 5G, AI, and semiconductors. Simultaneously, Chinese capital exports soared, overtaking inward FDI by 2020. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, became the vehicle for China’s global expansion, securing energy resources, raw materials, and markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Through the BRI and state-backed monopolies, China emerged as the principal creditor of the Global South, the leading trade partner in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and a major military power asserting influence in the South China Sea. Its imperialist ascent — rooted in bureaucratically managed capitalism — has destabilised the US-led world order that once fostered its rise, inaugurating a new epoch of global inter-imperialist rivalry.
